TAMPA, Fla. — To some people here at the Republican National Convention, a sophistry merchant like Dinesh D'Souza strides the globe like a colossus. Here, this man D'Souza is a truth-teller for the ages. Glenn Beck says that only D'Souza knows the truth about Obama and his deeply un-American designs for the country which we all call home. Rush Limbaugh talks about D'Souza with awe and excitement, and says that his new documentary may well constitute a turning point in this election. 2016: Obama's America (No. 1 at the box office over the weekend, on a gross per-screen basis, No. 8 overall) is the unified field theory of the interloper Obama, the key to understanding everything about his otherness for those who live for dark conspiracies, and D'Souza is being celebrated for his courage and scholarship and good timing. Thank God he told this essential story before the election, the thinking goes. 2016 should be required viewing. In D'Souza's fever dream, even Obama's focus-group bromides from 2008, Hope and Change, take on new and sinister meaning before our eyes. Don't you see, people? He is not at all what he appears to be. Cue ominous music.

Of course, D'Souza only passes as a scholar for people who live in the Fox bubble, and get all their information from Fox, and only talk to other bubblers. But that's okay. Everybody's got to earn a buck, baby needs new shoes, and D'Souza's got a genius shtick going.

His basic idea is that Obama's cool comportment is but a disciplined cover for a seething rage and determination to, in the course of a single presidency, correct the grievous harm that America has inflicted on the world. He recently told Beck (who can't get enough of this shit): "Obama has a global vision that is, 'I want to set the ship of the world right, and what that means is that America has to go down, so the rest of the world can come up.' ... Barack Obama subscribes to an ideology that sees America as the rogue nation in the world. What is this ideology? It's kind of a third-world anti-Americanism, anti-colonialism."

Shhh... don't tell D'Souza and his groupies that anti-colonialism and anti-Americanism are not the same thing, and in truth are opposites, so much so that it can be said that the the characteristic that first distinguished the American people from all the other peoples of the earth was our determined anti-colonialism. We fought a whole war about it (see Revolution, American).

Has there ever been an American president who wasn't "anti-colonial"?

D'Souza goes on to actually make these words come out of his mouth:

Obama possesses in his pocket what can be called certificates of racial absolution. Now, I don't mean by this simply that he's black, African-American. That's not the key to it. The key to it is that he's a different kind of African-American. He's not Jesse Jackson, he's not Al Sharpton. We're used to black leaders who make racial demands — "you're a racist, unless you pay me'"— and that has put America in a very defensive position. Here comes Obama, and he never brings the subject up. He's above it. He's the racial healer.... The fact that he doesn't intimidate you with explicit racial appeals is immensely relieving to whites, because whites go, Oh wow, he allows us to believe that we've gotten beyond all that.... This is Obama's secret weapon.

You see what D'Souza did just there? He just told us that the proof for his elaborate Kenyan anti-colonial rage theory is that there is no proof at all. Obama's not even acting black! That's how good he is at this game. And he is ruthlessly fulfilling the socialistic plan of his America-hating father by... renewing the Bush tax cuts, passing Bob Dole's health care plan from 1993, and surging the troops in Afghanistan. Can't you people see?!

Now, we can't blame that whole Fox demographic for their lusty consumption of this demented ahistoric bilge, as they're in the bunker where there's hardly any air and no natural light. But one must continue to blame D'Souza, whose crimes against truth and reason continue to earn him far too decent a living.

But those of us not in the bubble have an obligation to counter this nonsense and point out D'Souza's obvious projection: While he points at Obama and says, "Un-America," it is D'Souza himself who hates America and her values.

Remember, it is D'Souza who five years ago published The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he blamed the death that rained down on us on September 11, 2001 not on on the religious fanatics who were actually responsible for it, but on his fellow Americans. The "cultural left" who, by its failure to stone homosexuals to death in the public square, and its insistence on speaking so freely and having so much sex, provoked the violence of crazy Muslims, giving them no choice but to kill us en masse. That's what D'Souza's book actually said.

The man who spun that fantasy earned more money per screen last weekend than The Expendables 2.

Incidentally, when The Enemy at Home came out, I challenged D'Souza to fight. He never answered me directly, though he did complain to the papers that I wanted to put him in the hospital. On that, at last, he and I can agree. The offer continues to stand. Dinesh, I'm in Tampa, and am very easy to reach. Call me.